As telcos make key strategic pivots this year in the areas of fixed broadband, 5G, and virtualization/ cloudification of the network, a common unifying initiative is the automation of the network. There are many competing definitions and visions of how we can understand this, but the fundamental, immutable fact is that automation depends on good quality real-time data. Stable, reliable, and cost-effective data pipelines are now an absolute prerequisite for real-time automation tasks like anomaly detection, forecasting, recommendation, remediation, etc.